ground of seeking their own personal security. A great part of Italy passed back and forth in the same way.

The Dutch, from whom the Belgians had suffered so much in the wars of religion, had gained their independence of Spain under Philip II. in the sixteenth century. But the Belgians, though they revolted from Spain, did not succeed, remaining part of the Empire as the Spanish Netherlands until they were transferred to Austria by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.

The golden age of Belgian development was from 1624 to 1713 under the rule of Archduke Albert and Isabella, daughter of Philip of Spain, an age when Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens, Plantin the printer, Mercator the mapmaker, Heinsius, Lipsius and other notables flourished. When the kings of Europe fought over their dynastic squabbles, Belgium was one of the scenes of conflict. Italy also had to suffer from the disputes of the princes. Through the centuries the armies of France and Spain and Austria march over these favoured lands, murdering, plundering and burning. In the war of the Austrian succession for instance Maria Theresa of Austria was also Grand Duchess of Tuscany and Duchess of Milan, and defended her Italian dominions from her allied enemies. "At the foot of the Alps, in the rich plains of Lombardy, the French and German armies had for two centuries met in deadly encounter and mingled their blood in the waters of the Po."

The condition of Germany in the eighteenth century and far into the nineteenth was so extraordinary that I have thought it worth while to insert here an account of it by a trustworthy authority of the later nineteenth century.

Writing of the German States, at the time of the war of the Austrian succession, the Duke de Broglie (Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa) thus describes the "ill-joined and illassorted members whose co-operation was necessary to bring about the least movement of what was called the Germanic body. Let us picture to ourselves a territory which did not then contain more than twenty-five millions of men, and whose extent was only one-third greater than that of France at the present day (1882), with 300 independent sovereigns, all claiming to reign by an equal title; the two who were on a par with the greatest royalties of Europe, equally with the eighty whose dominions did not cover an area of more than eight or ten square

leagues. Let us trace out the strange configuration of these innumerable States upon the map, and observe how they are all entangled together by the various accidents of conquest or succession, the small states dovetailing into the great, and the various possessions of the same owner situated at the most opposite points of the horizon. Let us try to keep in our head all the denominations of these potentates-electors, kings, dukes, archdukes, counts palatine, bishops, margraves, burgraves, landgraves—a variety of titles which correspond to every political form that a society can assume, from pure monarchy at Vienna and Berlin to ecclesiastical rule at Mainz and Cologne, and even down to republican liberty in the imperial cities. Then let us study divisibility pushed ad infinitum in the interior of these units, which were not even atoms, by the co-existence of 40,000 seigneuries, and almost as many abbeys, guilds, orders or chapters, all endowed with immunities, or exercising privileged jurisdictions, and we shall get a glimpse of the spectacle of incoherence and confusion which was presented by Germany in the eighteenth century, at the moment when national unity was already firmly constituted in France, under the hand of a powerful administration, and freely represented in England by a Parliament grouped round a popular throne." "This strange amalgam claimed also to form an organized body endowed with the principal elements that constitute a government. It had a central executive power personified in the Emperor, a legislative power sitting at Ratisbon in an elective Diet. But these institutions, even supposing, which is doubtful, that they ever had serious consistency, were no longer anything more than the ghost of a great memory. For a long time past the imperial dignity possessed no inherent power, and could only make itself respected by borrowing that of the prince who was invested with it. In fact, the Emperor retained the discretionary use of only two of his inherent faculties: the nomination to certain benefices, and the bestowal of titles of honour. In every other exercise of authority he had to ask the co-operation, and consequently submit to the control, of his powerful subordinates." The Emperor in election swore to do nothing to render the Empire hereditary in his family, and to respect all the rights and privileges of the princes. Among the number of these was the right to make treaties, either

among themselves or even with foreign princes." But the Emperor, admitting their independence, was bound to support their authority against their own subjects.

There was an imperial administration and High Court of Justice, but without means of enforcing decrees. The imperial army, of which the Emperor appointed the Commander-in-chief, was from 20,000 to 40,000 men. "Each company was formed of the contingent of several states, and each kept its own uniform and armament. There were states whose entire contingent consisted of two men, equipped at their own expense, but also in their own fashion." Imperial finances did not exist; each sovereign was supposed to furnish a subscription but no means of compelling him to pay it were provided. "The right of the states extended, always in proportion to their means, to the nomination of inferior officers, so that in the same company the captain might be nominated by a king, the first lieutenant by a city, the second by the head of a religious order or even by an abbess. And then, so that no one should be offended or discontented, the officers Protestant and Catholic were to be of an equal number, and to occupy equivalent ranks."

The Constitution of the Diet . . . seemed to be expressly contrived to keep up the mutual distrust of all the states, small and great, or if the great came to an understanding it was that they might oppress and annul the small." Since the peace of Westphalia matters had been arranged so that religious disputes in the Diet should be avoided. Though the avoidance was not complete, this fear of religious dissension deadened the powers of the German Empire, dividing the religions by territories, instead of softening and uniting them. Any petty sovereign might look upon himself as a champion of the Bible or the Church, hold his puny state as a Holy Land which he was bound to defend, and thus invest his most foolish prerogatives with the character of sacred inviolability. . . . Under cover of the new principle of liberty of conscience, the old system of feudality preserved all its former features."

"As the Emperor was always a Catholic, it was especially among the Protestants that an obstinate resistance to the most legitimate exercise of the central authority was organized. The Reformation, whose tempestuous breath had dispersed the traditions of the Middle Ages everywhere else,

had preserved in Germany the most antiquated institutions of the past, and, as it were, frozen them into rigid immobility."

There was one point on which these states were all agreed, sullen and jealous irritation with France. "During half a century Louis XIV. had sent his army so many times across the Rhine needlessly and, without a pretext, had made his friends pay so dearly for his alliance and his enemies feel his power so keenly, had carved the record of his exploits on so many triumphal arches, and had wounded the amour propre that never sleeps, so long and so deeply, that at length patriotism awoke from its slumber. There are, besides, certain faults which Providence punishes by denying them oblivion. The soldiers of Turenne little knew to what an undying hatred on the part of Germany they devoted the very name of their country when they inscribed it in letters of blood and fire on all the hills of the Palatinate." It was written of France and Germany at the opening of the war of the Austrian succession in 1740.

Holland, in the later seventeenth century the greatest naval power of the time, dominating trade in the East and West Indies, walked delicately as the wars waged round her, the Austrian or Spanish Netherlands, our modern Belgium, forming some sort of buffer against France, while the dykes and the seas and the Rhine sheltered her from Austro-Germany.

Sweden, whose influence had been so powerful in the wars of religion under her great king Gustavus Adolphus, had little part in the commercial expansion which marked the eighteenth century. But she was destined to throw for a moment a flash of brilliant light on the affairs of Eastern Europe under her warlike king, Charles XII. The other Scandinavian powers played subordinate parts.

In the East of Europe were three great absolute monarchies, Austria, Russia and Turkey. Between these great empires of the East and the decaying feudalism of the West lay the great kingdom of Poland, then a vast area with a military population but with no strategic boundaries, expressing the most extreme and most helpless form of feudalism, surrounded by powerful neighbours who afterwards destroyed her.

One may fairly say, I think, that for the first half at least of the eighteenth century there was no moral sense whatever in this Europe among the European nations. Treaties and oaths

counted for nothing. So far as politics were concerned it was a cage of wild beasts.

Being a purely arbitrary division of time, no century is likely to contain in itself all the elements of change. The last forty years of the seventeenth century were making great preparation for the events of the eighteenth. As compared with the years to come, and with those which ended in the Thirty Years' War, there was almost a rest from war in Europe, as the nations of the West began their great expansion and commercial competition in other continents.

The feudal system on the continent, as it decayed and thoroughly broke up, fell into one of two extremes; either the federal power, as I have pointed out, in the West drew together all authority into a central control and depressed or extinguished the responsibilities of the lesser component parts, or it became a mere titular overlord, a helpless figure-head among a mob of quarrelsome petty barons. I take this last extreme first, the classical example of exhausted feudalism, Poland.

If we would study history away from that confining habit of crediting each success or failure to the direct action of some superman of good or evil, we must realize that the political or economic changes that come in the centuries are the result of causes beyond man's control. Regulations made by rulers and the actions that follow them have not for the most part in themselves any motive power; they express only the efforts of those responsible for affairs to avoid or to modify the evil effects of the fundamental change or economic movement which they are powerless to prevent. The storm past, the historian looking seawards sometimes assumes that some pre-eminent crest of spume in the distance has been the cause of the tempest ; that the actions of King John brought about the re-editing of the Charter of Henry I.: that Luther caused the Reformation or Rousseau the French Revolution; all events of which the causes were in full motion before any of them were born. The world moves on its course of change, decay or growth apart from any human effort or any individual energy.

Then again the essential economic change when it comes may be beneficial or the reverse according to the time at which it matures and the stage of progress to which the country has